The woke, and broke, cause of Scottish Nationalism

Somewhere along the line, it all went wrong for the Scottish National Party.

The SNP exists, it must be remembered, for one reason and one reason alone: To fulfil, some eight hundred years after his death by hanging, drawing, and quartering, the dream of William Wallace. To establish (or perhaps re-establish) a completely Independent Scotland that has not existed in any form since the death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603 and the union of the crowns under James I & VI.

For a moment there, in the early twenty-teens, the dream was tantalizingly close: The Scots had a referendum on the matter in 2014, and though the vote against independence was decisive, it was not exactly overwhelming. With the advent of Brexit (a policy Scotland voted against) there were great hopes that a second referendum would come in short order, and that the act of union would be finally, and permanently, sundered.

That moment, it is fair to say, has entirely passed. If opinion polls are to be believed, the SNP will lose its dominant position in Scots politics at the UK General Election to come later this year or early next year, with the entirely unionist Labour Party re-asserting its ancient dominance instead. Yesterday, the SNP lost its second leader in a little over a year, and the SNP administration in Scotland looks to be teetering perilously on the edge of oblivion. Independence looks as far away as it has looked in maybe two or three decades.

Why?

Two reasons, I’d suggest: The first and most proximate is that the SNP forgot why it exists. It is the face of Scottish Nationalism, and its actions are supposed to reflect what an Independent Scotland would actually be like to live in. Over the past year, we’ve gotten a fair approximation of that:

An independent Scotland would be the land of the Scottish hate speech bill, a law so egregiously absurd that it has swiftly become the laughing stock of the western world. It would be the land of the Scottish Gender recognition act – a law that sees grown, hairy testicled men declaring themselves women for the purposes of incarceration in prisons immediately after their convictions, and being treated as women by the Scottish Government. In short, the SNP painted a vision through their governance of an Independent Scotland that would be one of the wokest and most left wing in the world.

The Scots, it turns out, aren’t that keen. As salesmen for what life in an Independent Scotland would be like, the SNP have done a better job of warning against it than any Englishman could.

The second reason is probably really two reasons, but we’ll lump them together under the umbrella of wider UK realities. First, it’s hard to under-sell the extent to which anti-Englishness in Scotland is really “Anti Toryism”. Read many of the arguments for Scottish Independence and you’ll read – often from the SNP themselves – claims that only an Independent Scotland could be rid of hated Tory rule. Now, with the UK Labour Party ascendant in the polls and likely to rule at Westminster within the year, that argument has lost some of its legs.

The other wider UK reality is, of course, Northern Ireland and Brexit: Far from making Scottish Independence more likely, Brexit has made it immeasurably more complicated. What could have been, while in the EU, a borderless border between England and Scotland is now the prospect of a hard border of the European Union if – as they declare – the SNP wishes to re-join the club in Brussels. Ironically, the Irish Government may have done more in the aftermath of Brexit to harm the cause of Scottish Independence than anyone else, by emphasizing just how painful and miserable such a border might be. The English have no reason to offer the Scots any hope on that front, either.

The SNP, meanwhile, risks fracturing along its various dividing lines: Losing “woke” votes to the Scottish Greens, hard line independence votes to Alex Salmond’s “Alba” rump, and losing centre left “soft nationalist anti Tory” votes to the resurgent Scottish Labour Party. It also faces the prospect, in due course, of losing power in the Scottish Parliament.  All of this is without mentioning the ongoing criminal probe into embezzlement of party funds, which has already brought down one leader, and may yet lead to criminal charges for that same leader.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson here, really, other than that in Ireland, post Brexit, Scottish Independence was widely regarded as a matter of “when” not “if”, and the fact of it was talked about as a racing certainty. That such talk was garnished with more than a dollop of anti-English schadenfreude is certain, but there’s a lesson in that too: Don’t believe in things just because you want them to be true.

The great irony is that in the past few years, the Scottish Nationalists have done more to strengthen the act of union than to weaken it. Or, to put it perhaps in a more vernacular phrase: They went woke. Now, they’re broke.